What is Tesseract? Tesseract is a sort of Frankenstein's monster that escaped the lab when I ripped out the static lightmapped heart of Sauerbraten, squished it under-foot with extreme prejudice, and stitched it back together with deferred shading and shadowmapping.

The actual code is at a github repository for the moment:
https://github.com/lsalzman/tesseract

See the README for some more details about running it.

The code is still under Zlib license.

The work on this code was done in collaboration with Benjamin Segovia over the last month or so.

The codebase is still in a state of high flux, so I would expect a lot of changes coming in the future.

The goal of all of this is not really to replace Sauerbraten and development on Sauerbraten itself will continue into the future. This is just a fork, a what-if experiment to see what it might look like if it dropped all concerns about compatibility and good performance on old hardware and just tried to modernize.

In fact, while it can load Sauerbraten maps, the lighting model of Tesseract is roughly incompatible, as not only do Sauerbraten maps use way too many lights, but Tesseract renders the lights a bit differently.

Tesseract is not at this moment endeavoring to be a stand-alone game, but just another parallel codebase people interested in the engine can choose from to work from if they want to mod it into a game of their own.

I can't really fathom why that would have anything to do with it. On the WIN32 builds, it should be a no-op - that is, do nothing at all. Did you somehow not define the WIN32 preprocessor macro when building?

I totally love tesseract. I'm currently using it instead of the sauerbraten client, when playing online or offline, it works nearly perfect for me (using a manually compiled version under Ubuntu). There are two things I noticed, tough:
1: Somehow on some maps the lighting system does not produce the best results (e.g.: Asgard, everything flickers like crazy) Oh, and somehow on venice, there never has been done a calclight run under sauerbraten :D
2: Water looks extremely "foggy"

Now, I know that this is a development version and that things are likely to be vastly improved over time.

Please keep up your awesome work eihrul, i relly love Tesseract, it is a huge improvement to cube 2.
regards, byte

There is a standing bug on maps larger than size 13 but i do not know what causes it. It also makes the shadows become offset from where they should be, which leads me to think it's some sort of precision issue.

eihrul could tell you more if he bothers, i don't remember the details.

I know everyone hates feature requests, but it would be nice if the sound engine would recieve some updates as well.
Being able to define footstep and impact sounds in the texture configuration file would be very nice.
(also sound propagation, doppler and all that crap...)

Having samples isn't the issue I think. There's plenty of decent FOSS ones any project can just pick up.

Sure... why add them? I don't see Sauer adding them ever since it's against the philosophy. However if Tesseract has it's own game in the works (?) it could benefit. I think it's an amazing engine in many regards, but in terms of sound I always felt it lagged behind all the idTech stuff and whatnot. All the updates on the renderer are very impressive, and the unified lighting and shadowing is the best out there. I just wish some of the other aspects would get some love.

Ofcourse it's eihrul's call. It's all his time and work and I feel like a tard for asking without having something constructive to add.

Lately we are starting to work towards making Tesseract a stand-alone game/media project independent from Sauerbraten. As such, I made the decision to move back to an SVN repository to better deal with the larger load of forthcoming media assets. This SVN repository is now hosted by TuxFamily (http://tuxfamily.org), which seems to be a nice group of folks offering FOSS projects full-service hosting that was better than most other services I could find, including SourceForge.

The details of the repository can be found at the new Tesseract landing page at: http://tesseract.gg

The landing page is somewhat barebones at the moment, but should give the requisite details for using the SVN repo. You no longer need any Sauerbraten install or packages to use it, and indeed, the latest codebase is now in some ways incompatible with Sauerbraten content aside from the ability to still import map geometry.

suicizer: yeah I was under the impression Eihrul had something to do with it, but I might be mistaking. Anyway, it's easy enough to build with codeblocks, even for noobs like me.

Stupid feature requests:

I was wondering if it's possible future versions will have some kind of fade between the different levels of the RH grid? The popping is a little bit distracting. Kind of a shame since it looks so nice in bright sunlight. I'm sure if it was an easy problem it would be there already, and these large scale volume things seem tricky, but yeah, it's just a bit of a shame.

On the topic of bright sunlight, it would be useful to have some kind of setting for the cascaded shadows to have hardened edges without having to blow up the res/splits or lower the farplane too much. I've seen this in various other games, so I'm assuming it's possible...

Finally, I really like the screenspace reflections, but it's a bit weird having it disappear on parts where it's pointing outside the buffer. Is it possible to use the nearest cubemap for reflections on those parts? Might look worse in some edge cases maybe... think putting a cubemap near water and reflective stuff is reasonable enough for mappers to do though.